Deborah Zlotsky, Altoon Sultan, Kate Petley, Scott Chamberlin, and Stephanie Robison

Deborah Zlotsky, Altoon Sultan, Kate Petley, Scott Chamberlin, and Stephanie Robison

Jillian Blackwell
Review

The five solo exhibitions currently on view at Robischon Gallery each capture a delicate and masterful use of color and texture. When entering the gallery on a gray winter day, one is washed over with the bright palette of Deborah Zlotsky’s paintings. In contrast to Zlotsky’s large cartoonish paintings, Altoon Sultan’s serene works are in praise of small things—diminutive compositions, small repeating loops of wool, and closely cropped images of parts of a whole. Kate Petley’s photographs utilize a slight of hand to engage the viewer in active seeing. And nestled in the back room are the works of Scott Chamberlin and Stephanie Robison, who approach materiality and texture with the same vigor that the other artists approach color.

The Horizon and Everything Within It

The Horizon and Everything Within It

Dani/elle Cunningham
Review

Every year, the Center for Fine Art Photography (C4FAP) in Fort Collins and Loveland's Artworks Center for Contemporary Art (ACCA) collaborate on a lens-based exhibition. As the C4FAP and exhibition curator Hamidah Glasgow notes, the significance of such exhibitions to the art community is that they counter the notion that successful art can only be made in a competitive vacuum. This year's offering is a double testament to this sentiment, as it highlights the collaborative spirit between C4FAP and ACCA while exhibiting several collaborations among artists.

Visitors can expect to be confronted by the contemporary theme of identity, but what sets the exhibition apart are the processes of identity exploration these artists are willing to share, including visceral representations of the intimate steps they have taken to know themselves better. From manipulating mediums to manipulating their own bodies, each artist questions their physical and psychological limits, the constructed boundaries of the world, and even the fluidity of art media. The exhibition features Alicia Rodriguez Alvisa and Lidzie Alvisa, Kristianne Riddle, Rafael Soldi, and Lorenzo Triburgo and Sara Van Dyck.

As of Now

As of Now

Jillian Blackwell
Review

K Contemporary’s As of Now exhibition sums up the gallery’s last five years of existence, not only in the work that it has shown, but also in how it has approached the world. With owner Doug Kacena at the helm, K Contemporary navigates the troubled waters of our times, exploring relevant cultural matters, current events, and how the pandemic has affected us all. Kacena champions artists who do not shy away from hefty topics that are difficult to handle, whose works add insight or nuance to discussions of subjects like race, politics, and death. As of Now not only highlights the featured artists’ work, but also explores how the gallery built connections between those artists and the broader world.

Traitor, Survivor, Icon

Traitor, Survivor, Icon

Madeleine Boyson
Review

Around 1503-1507, a Nahua girl later known by various names—Malina, Malinalli Tenépatl, Doña Marina, Malintzin, La Malinche—was born on Mexico’s Gulf coast. Malinche was a principal, if overlooked actor during this period, garnering a complicated, yet impassioned heritage of criticism and admiration as both a traitor and “the mother of Mexico.” Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche at the Denver Art Museum is the first ever comprehensive art exhibition examining Malinche’s significance.

Pitit Tig / Children of Tigers

Pitit Tig / Children of Tigers

Renée Marino
Review

On a wintry Sunday, I had the pleasure of walking through Leon Gallery with Viktor El-Saieh, the curator of Pitit Tig / Children of Tigers. Featuring works by ten contemporary Haitian artists, including El-Saieh himself, the exhibition tells many interweaving stories. Bright colors warm the air. Deities, mermaids, and townsfolk depicted as cats play-out cultural rhythms through densely painted scenes, textiles, carved wood, and clay sculpture. The artists’ work speaks for itself—brilliant in technique, craft, and character. Most of the pieces were lovingly created thousands of miles away. Despite the distance, Pitit Tig / Children of Tigers is embedded with a reverence for Haitian culture, history, and spirituality that gives art patrons a glimpse into this faraway home.

Community Forms

Community Forms

Livy Snyder
Review

Community Forms is an outdoor installation on the TAXI Campus in Denver by artist Matt Barton (b. 1975), created for the nonprofit, nomadic art museum Black Cube. In 2021, Barton received an 18-month artist fellowship with Black Cube to produce a site-specific work that expands audience engagement with contemporary art. To that end, Barton designed Community Forms as Black Cube’s first permanent site-specific artwork.

Deep Space

Deep Space

Ashten Scheller
Review

Walking into the white cube space of the fooLPRoof gallery—originally a 1930s warehouse in the increasingly-trendy RiNo neighborhood, attached to an equally trendy bar—the high ceilings make the physical space optimal for the various media on display. From large-scale installation to traditional sculptures atop plinths and canvas paintings mounted on the walls, the individual components that make up the current Deep Space show are varied in both media and orientation.

Margaret Kasahara

Margaret Kasahara

Dani/elle Cunningham
Artist Profile

If art is alchemy, then Margaret Kasahara is an alchemist. Using common items like toothpicks, buttons, and her own hair, the multi-disciplinary artist elevates these objects through her art processes, transforming them from common to sacred. And she takes her wizardry a step further, sometimes seemingly stopping time through her transformations while also reminding viewers of time’s unstoppable passage.

Voices of the Desert

Voices of the Desert

Carissa Samaniego
Review

If you’d like to see something different when you imagine the desert, Cherish Marquez offers us a counter narrative in her solo exhibition at Union Hall in Denver called Voices of the Desert. Marquez uses imagery, animation, natural materials, virtual objects, and tactile experiences in this exhibit to capture the quiet, humble wisdom that you can find in the desert. The artwork offers a slow look at a cast of non-human characters symbolic of desert life who share glimpses into an unseen mystic consciousness.

I’m

I’m

Renée Marino
Review

Deborah Roberts’ latest exhibition, I’m, is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver until January 30th, 2022. Using a combination of acrylic paint, collaged found faces, and ink, her works carry worlds of meaning. “I want us to see ourselves as a heroic people,” she says. I’m speaks directly to the humanity of being, specifically being Black. Through I’m, Roberts not only brings new, meaningful representations of Black children into a cultural conversation, but further implores viewers to witness cultural expectations of Blackness, through the eyes of a child.

Sinners, Saints & Fools

Sinners, Saints & Fools

Maggie Sava
Review

Encompassing 25 individual works and one large installation, Sinners, Saints & Fools—the exhibition currently illuminating the main gallery space of Valkarie Gallery—is the largest solo show of artist Maria Valentina Sheets’s stained glass art to date. The impressive display demonstrates her deep knowledge and appreciation for the material and the traditions of the genre. However, it also captures her impulse to experiment and expand the potential of the medium. Through a combination of complex portraiture and contemporary parables with not so simple answers, Sheets works to bridge the divide between the binaries of timely and timeless and worldly and unworldly, all while renegotiating social and cultural consecration.

Fervor

Fervor

Jillian Blackwell
Review

Ana María Hernando’s exhibition Fervor at the Denver Botanic Gardens is a well-balanced, harmonious display of embroideries and sculpture. Hernando also fills the two gallery spaces of the exhibit with sound. In one room, bird calls echo against the hard walls and collide mid-air with the abstract embroideries that dangle from the ceiling. In the next room, Hernando’s own voice swells, reciting her own poem accompanied by dissonant orchestral music.

Tools of Conveyance / Staring into the Fire

Tools of Conveyance / Staring into the Fire

j. gluckstern
Review

A luminous, violet-hued skull greets viewers as they enter Tim Whiten’s exhibition Tools of Conveyance—a retrospective of work from the last 40 years—at the University of Colorado Art Museum in Boulder. Kate Petley’s Staring into the Fire prods us toward different sorts of awareness. Her striking abstract prints and paintings challenge our understanding of surface, depth, color, and representation.

Where Is Every Body? / Wandering Spirit

Where Is Every Body? / Wandering Spirit

Emily Zeek
Review

To contemplate the impact and ideologies behind fashion locally, the Avenir Museum in Fort Collins is well worth visiting. In the exhibit Where Is Every Body? Mannequins and Mounts—a nod to body types, the sense of absence created by social distancing, and the ubiquity of clothing on bodies across the globe—the history of the mannequin is tied into the history of art. A traveling exhibition titled Wandering Spirit: African Wax Prints charts the history of African wax print fabrics through their unlikely origin in Indonesia, to the textile mass production factories of the Netherlands, to where they have received commercial success in West Africa, the exhibition tells a story of global trade, colonization, and commerce through the medium of fashion and textiles.

The Fantasy Show

The Fantasy Show

Madeleine Boyson
Review

The Fantasy Show is a group exhibition of eleven participants, on view through December 17. Six “Design and Build Emerging Artists” join five 2021 Artists in Residence in a curious blend of styles and materials under a generalized “fantasy” theme. By inviting viewers to reignite their relationship with play, The Fantasy Show asserts that great art depends upon good make believe. Moreover, the works demonstrate that art is a playground to indulge the senses, a medium to contact our inner children, and a carte blanche to imagine the world we want, even as we try to escape the one we don’t.

at the line

at the line

Mary Grace Bernard
Review

The show currently on view in the Central and South El Pomar Galleries at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is Ronny Quevedo’s solo exhibition at the line. It includes works on paper and muslin, as well as a site-specific installation. As the Curator of Contemporary Art Katja Rivera explains in an accompanying pamphlet, the exhibition is a celebration of Quevedo’s recent artistic practice. His works weave together layered histories from across the Americas, speak to the formation of diasporic identities, and use materials and processes connected with immigration both past and present. As a result, Quevedo blurs geographic, historical, and temporal boundaries to highlight the complex narratives of the movement(s) associated with historically marginalized peoples. Before the exhibition opened, I had the pleasure of meeting Quevedo and Rivera and viewing the galleries during installation.

CATALYST

CATALYST

Laura I. Miller
Review

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020, Niza Knoll of Denver’s Niza Knoll Gallery had just asked mixed-media artist Jennifer Ghormley if she’d be interested in producing an immersive show. Fast forward to September 2021 when CATALYST—an immersive art exhibit created by five local artists: Ghormley, Victoria Eubanks, Kendra Fleischman, Judy Gardner, and Bonnie Ferrill Roman—has transformed the Niza Knoll Gallery into a playful, multi-sensory experience that combines art and technology.

In Other Words / Word Play

In Other Words / Word Play

Eric G. Nord
Review

In the artworks of the late Roland Bernier—featured in “In Other Words,” one of two recently-premiered, text-based exhibitions at The Arvada Center for the Arts—the meaning of words and linear narratives retreat and recede. The visual aesthetic of the text takes precedent, disassociating it from its practical purpose where words serve as metaphor. The accompanying exhibition, “Word Play,” is comprised of work from 15 additional contemporary Colorado artists. It demonstrates the great expanse of possibilities within text-based art, while further emphasizing the conscious restraint that Bernier employed.

Black in Denver

Black in Denver

Dani/elle Cunningham
Review

As the title implies, Narkita Gold’s first professional body of work focuses on Denver’s Black community, primarily female. The artist pairs colorful photographic portraits with interviews in order to prioritize individual experiences while also highlighting the sometimes overlooked fact that Black people have always lived in Denver. Though there are a few well-known faces in the row of images, most of the women featured are ordinary Denverites. They are relatable, yet Gold elevates them to near-celebrity status by using a style of portraiture with an aristocratic presentation, revealing only the top half of the subject’s body and focusing on their face. Black in Denver is currently on view at History Colorado.

Load More